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Friday, June 1, 2012

Contracts and Projects Galore

It's been a while since I've posted, but I feel of all the excuses to have, being busy is one of the better ones. My latest endeavors have landed me a small, but fun, website contract for my friend Mark Gonzalez. He was in dire need of a portfolio website, so I've been working on building it for him over the last couple of weeks. It's important for me to keep doing web design work because I'm so vastly inexperienced compared to other front-end developers or freelance designers, and with every website built I learn a few new things.

In addition to freelance web design work, I was recently offered a small writing contract with EBSCO, a database and publishing company. I never thought my BA in Game Design would qualify me for something, but they have several articles related to video games and technology in general. Needless to say I'm more than excited to enter the world of writing, and can't wait for the first contract to be signed.

These bits of news are all fine and dandy, but this is a design blog right? I recently wrote a brief postmortem on Fireball; an analysis on the factors that caused the project to fail. Generally postmortems follow a "What went right / What went wrong" approach, but I wrote this one specifically to focus on what went wrong. I wanted to create a tool we could use next time around, a sort of guideline for making sure we learned from our mistakes. None of us on the team wanted to end the project, but for numerous reasons it had to be at least stopped and analyzed. There is a chance we'll be picking it back up, at least in some form or another, in the near future. But before we even consider that we have to learn, and my postmortem was the first step towards that. Here's the link: Fireball Postmortem.

In the postmortem I mention that in order for the team members of Real Dedicated to begin working on it again, we'll all need to clear our plates. I still have a lot of work on HeroCraft to do, but I'm excited nonetheless. I've recently implemented the last mechanic and feature of the game and will be testing it this weekend, and have started a new prototype board. Barring any huge changes, I'm hoping to get the game in a more polished testing state so I can present it to David Wessman at the University of Advancing Technology and have his GAM170 students playtest it. Doing cold tests are scary, but they're invaluable. My goal for doing cold tests at UAT is the Fall 2012 term, which starts in September. When I have a new board printed out I'll post some pictures!

Also, a huge congratulations to my friend Austin Langston who just landed a job in New York as a mobile games designer!